NAV "Crete"

Noeline

Hi. I came across mention of the next release of NAV due at the end of 2014, referred to as NAV Crete. My predicament is that I am preparing to do a heavily customized upgrade/migration from 5 to 2013 R2 and have no information whatsoever about this new release. I am concerned that the upgrade is done an suddenly there is a new release that requires another upgrade once Crete is released. Given that it is already June, surely there cant be any new release till next year?

Anyone out there have any info on this? Major change to tables or forms? Best guesses will do

kine

Expect same "difference" like between nav 4 and 5, not 2009 and 2013... expect changes in technology but only small/adding, not so much changes like between 2009 and 2013. If you upgrade now to 2013 r2, it will be easy to upgrade to "Crete" for you...

Noeline

Thank you so much. Any idea when it will be released?

davmac1

Microsoft has promised one release per year and Directions is usually the time they introduce it because they can train so many people at the same time.
Directions is early this year, so we may only get a view of the beta.
The people who don't know like me, can make educated guesses. The people who do know are not allowed to tell us yet.

Noeline

Thanks for that. I understand Directions takes place in September, so I will rather wait for the beta before I start the coding.

Marije_Brummel

Be carefull waiting Noeline, Microsoft ships a new release each year and you cannot wait for each one.

You can safely start your project in 2013R2 and upgrade to crete aferwards, and then the next island in the Mediterranean Sea.

Upgrading gets to be easier from crete onwards.

tinoruijs

Mark Brummel wrote:

You can safely start your project in 2013R2 and upgrade to crete aferwards, and then the next island in the Mediterranean Sea.

geordie

Here a very partial list of the new features that will be available with NAV Crete.

Marije_Brummel

I would be carefull taking roumors like these websites too serious.

davmac1

This did not look like a list of new features. More like some standard marketing babble from Microsoft. See the published product future guideline for more details.
My Directions news says they will be talking about Crete, but it is due to be released Q4. Since Directions is end of Q3, if we are lucky, we will get a late beta to play with.
People like Mark have probably moved on to the next island already.

Miklos_Hollender

If customers are going to lose support every 2 years and thus have to buy 5-15 consulting days on upgrades (depending on the number of customizations and add-ons), how is this going to look like, did anyone at MSFT give a look to it? If a customer has a yearly profits of say €100K a year then dropping €10K on upgrade consulting every 2 years could be a big ouchie.

I mean will it be like a forced situation, "upgrade or suffer, FEAR the loss of support - tremble, ye pity mortal, for BAD THINGS will happen if you don't" every 2 years?

Or will it be more friendly like "not officially but probably your NAV will run on the next Windows as well and your friendly NAV partner will downgrade the most important regulatory changes cheaply so upgrade whenever you feel like doing, no pressure bro" type ?

Did they think it over how this will look like? The ecosystem, the attitude, these things? That it will be more fear-based negative or more positive?

kine

Biggest pain today: upgrade of the objects, upgrade of data. I am sure, that Crete will make it "piece of cake" (sort of...). Shortening the time to upgrade the existing solution is critical for all partners today. And each partner must accept process changes and restructure his operations to be able to make upgrades as quick as possible. It is possible just by aligning the development "rules" and "patterns" + using correct tools. From 1 week merge of objects done in text one by one could be few hours job. Just ask Waldo... ;-)

(and do not forget, "Cake is a lie...")

davmac1

Curious to see if this applies to new installs using the new patterns or whether it will also benefit existing users with sometimes haphazard mods.

Miklos_Hollender

@Kine this is not to the point. The point is how necessary will these much more frequent upgrades be. It is entirely beside the point how easy they would be in an entirely imagined situation.

Frankly I am tired about all the pontificating on this forum how things should be done. Whatever, even if everybody would started working differently know this would still not resolve the 15-20 years old legacy code done by 4 different partners + internal developers with an A.D. licence being rolled forward by every upgrade for every older time customer + the huge 200GB databases being migrated is also another timesink. Sure this could be cleaned up but show me one manager who is willing to pay for a 20 days of project that has no immediate business advantage but just some vague promises of longer time savings. Besides do you have the guts to delete something commented as "critical problem! Joe 18/12/2003" and you don't even have the idea who to ask about it because both the partners and the employees were changed like 3 times since that? This is just psychologically not realistic. This is not going to happen and these get rolled forward. (I once deleted some apparently stupid old change after asking every major subsidiary about it, and promptly caused a problem for a minor subsidiary... nice.) So they won't get cleaned up usually. Installations grow and grow.

Adding it the anger of customers who think that after 10-20 years of investing into it now they finally have a good system and not understand why a forced upgrade system would breed angrier when moved to a 2 year scale given that they would hardly finish one upgrade when they would have to start another[1]. However if the frequent upgrades would only be a recommendation, 2013 R2 would stay compatible with Windows for 4-6 years and some partners would create downgrades of regulatory changes, then it would be a whole lot more easy to swallow for all. That is what I am asking if it will be more like this.

[1] right now I am over 4 calendar months into one without even doing anything hands-on - I am just debating with users that yes, spending €5000 on replacing a 11 years old server hardware and licences is totally necessary, debating with add-on makers that yes, I do want to see a deadline now when the 2013 R2 version will be done and so on. By this timescale it will be 6 months between my first e-mail that began raising awareness at users for the necessity of upgrading and between starting to merge add-ons and install a test on the new server. Of course the net time is much less, but the gross (calendar) time of upgrades goes easily into 1 year due to the general organizational inertia i.e. people scratching their backsides and not replying emails without extra prodding. So you can see how weird it would be to go on the 2 year routine, basically finish one upgrade and start thinking about the second one. (New implementations are usually fast because they only happen when the old system is so painfully bad that everybody is eager to implement a new one. Why else would managers drop €100K on a new implementation if not all employees would be like "our old software is killing our nerves, buy a new one or we will all quit?" This is why new implementations happen fast, every user is super motivated and does their homework. Upgrades happen slowly because every user ever is standing on the brake pedal with two feet and is like "But it is finally working right, after years of tweaking it! Why do we have to change it again?" You know this, don't you?)

Vincent_Vancalbergh

@Miklos

You think 4 months is a long time?

I'm at a customer where we started analysis meetings on upgrading their 200GB+ 2.60 Adv.Distr. database to NAV 2009 R2 in 2011. First actual development started april 2014 (on NAV 2013 R2 of course) and is expected to go live april next year.

4 months is no time at all

kine

If we are talking about "users standing on the brake pedal with two feet..." we could start to talk about "partners standing on the brake pedal with two feet...". Times are changing, all is going in different directions that it was x years ago.

I know that many customers are "complicated" (in any meaning you can find for this word), but if implementation is badly done, it will not save it anything... and you can discuss about that as you wish.

But what I want to tell you: look at the CU9 and the merge cmdlets for merging objects. Try it. May be you will have some ideas what to do with them...

tinoruijs

For others who want to download CU for NAV 2013 R2. Here's the link of the announcement: http://community.dynamics.com/nav/b/navteam/archive/2014/07/07/cumulative-update-9-for-microsoft-dynamics-nav-2013-r2-has-been-released.aspx

tinoruijs

Great blog on the CU9 release for NAV 2013 R2:
http://www.klemmensen.ca/Blog/Post/14/Merging-Application-Objects-with-PowerShell-in-Cumulative-Update-9-for-Microsoft-Dynamics-NAV-2013-R2

geordie

In this roadmap picture a generic "Document reporting" point is mentioned. I suppose at this stage there are no details about it, right?

kine

There are details... but it seems like still under NDA... we are trying to find out if NDA is lifted or not yet...

Marije_Brummel

It has been public for a while, like here:

http://navtechdays.com/2014/sessions#of ... simplicity

It's about using Word instead of RDLC for reporting. Great solution.

davmac1

"Throughout the second part of the session, we will learn what is new in reporting for Microsoft Dynamics 2015. We will show our new reporting capabilities using Word as layout for documents, the technology behind Word Reporting and how to customize the rendering machine in a vertical. Then we will show end user customization for both Word and RDLC-based reports at runtime. As we have simplified sales document reports across countries, we will show what is refactored to make them simpler and easier to customize and reuse changes across related sales documents. Last but not least, we will demonstrate how to run reports in Job Queues including request page options."

So what does this mean? 2 reporting development platforms or one?
Do RDLC reports need to be converted or are both methods supported?
Unless Word has changed, it has the same limitations with putting data into page headers and footers.
Will there be any redesign of document reports to use the methods Claus Lundstrom has been promoting - using group headers instead?
Do we get to keep the reset page number added in VS 2012?

BTW - NAV Tech days looks good - if you would off the workshops over 3 days instead of 1, I might be tempted to come. :thumbsup:

kine

Of course, Word reporting is not "all solving". Do you need one page invoice? No problem... Do you need some short order confirmation? No problem. And it is not "two reporting platforms", but "two layout tools" for one "dataset" (simplified)...

Luc_VanDyck

davmac1 wrote:

BTW - NAV Tech days looks good - if you would off the workshops over 3 days instead of 1, I might be tempted to come. :thumbsup:

A 5-days conference would be too expensive, both in terms of costs as in terms of time investment. Mind you that the audience of this conference are Dynamics NAV developers ... who should be billable at all times ;-)

davmac1

Hi Luc,
I am reminded of the old joke about the woodsman who was hired to cut down trees.
The first day. he cut down 10, the next day 5, and the third day only 2.
When the foreman went to see what was wrong, he found the woodsman flailing away with an extremely blunt ax. When he asked him why he did not go and sharpen his ax, the woodsman replied - "I can't, I am too busy cutting down trees!"
Some professions require a minimum of 40 hours approved training every year. Ours has no standards unfortunately.
The cost of getting back and forth from the USA to Europe is not trivial - might as well pay extra on training and take full advantage of the trip.
I have to admit I resent the attitude that we should be billing all the time. If we do not take off time for training - and why not work time - why should our families suffer?
As an independent contractor, I work about 70 hours per week and pay my own way to conferences. I highly value good training opportunities. I wish more in the partner channel did.
I have found the right training can save a lot of time when put to use on projects.
You have done a great job setting up this conference. :thumbsup:
Maybe no one else is interested in more training - if so I will say no more.

BenSydney

Ah finally 'upgradation' will be much easier.
Wonder about the difference in new "Cash Management" functionality in NAV2015 and "Cash Management" functionality released in NAV2013 R2?

Is this the complete list or are there more wonderful surprises awaiting us?

Ben